Radium
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40 free Radium trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Radium may be the most storied element on the periodic table. For a few decades after its discovery it was the wonder of the age: it glowed in the dark, it was worth far more than gold, and it was stirred into tonics, cosmetics and paint. Then the people who worked with it began to fall ill. This quiz covers the whole story in fun facts: how Marie and Pierre Curie found the element, where it sits among the other elements and how it behaves, the craze for radioactive health products, and the factory workers whose court cases changed workplace safety law. It also looks at what radium is still used for. The questions start easy and get harder, so they suit curious beginners, students revising the elements and quiz fans looking for facts worth repeating. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What were the Radium Girls taught to do to keep their brushes fine-tipped?
Point them with their lips
Point them with their lips was the instruction, so each painter swallowed a little radium with every dial. Rags and rinsing were discouraged because they wasted time and paint.
Q 02Radium was first found in ore from Jáchymov, a town whose silver coins gave which currency its name?
The dollar
The dollar takes its name from the Joachimsthaler, a silver coin struck in the town from the 1500s and shortened to thaler. The same mines later supplied the ore for the Curies' discovery.
Q 03Marie Curie's research papers, still contaminated with radium, are kept in boxes lined with which metal?
Lead
Lead blocks enough of the radiation to make the papers safe to store, but anyone who consults them must still wear protective clothing. Even her cookbooks are radioactive.
Q 04The human body stores swallowed radium in the bones because it mistakes radium for which essential mineral?
Calcium
Calcium shares a column of the periodic table with radium, so the body handles the two alike. Once locked into bone, radium irradiates the marrow from the inside.
Q 05Radium decays directly into which radioactive gas, a leading cause of lung cancer among non-smokers?
Radon
Radon is what radium turns into when it decays, and it was first known as radium emanation. Being a gas, it enters the body far more easily than its solid parent.
Q 06Which other element, named after Marie Curie's homeland, did the Curies discover a few months before radium?
Polonium
Polonium came first, in July 1898, and radium followed that December from the same ore. The Curies found both by chasing radiation too strong for the known elements to explain.
Q 07Which two-letter symbol stands for radium on the periodic table?
Ra
Ra is radium's symbol, a name it happens to share with the Egyptian sun god. The element sits at number 88 and is the heaviest metal in its column.
Q 08Why did Marie Curie earn almost nothing from the booming radium industry that her discovery created?
She never patented her process
She never patented her process, choosing to leave it open so that other scientists could work with radium freely. Factories were soon selling the element at enormous prices.
Q 09In which city did Marie and Pierre Curie discover radium while working in a leaky converted shed?
Paris
Paris was where the Curies worked, in a former dissecting room that was poorly ventilated and not even waterproof. They announced radium to the French Academy of Sciences in December 1898.
Q 10Which part of the body famously rotted away in dial painters who swallowed radium paint?
The jaw
The jaw was hit so often that doctors named the condition after it, and dentists were among the first to spot the pattern. Sockets left by pulled teeth simply refused to heal.
Q 11Radium is the heaviest member of which periodic table family, alongside magnesium and strontium?
Alkaline earth metals
Alkaline earth metals fill the second column of the table, and radium is the only one with no stable form at all. It behaves most like the member sitting directly above it.
Q 12Which element, which burns with a green flame, is so like radium that the Curies struggled to separate the two?
Barium
Barium forms salts almost identical to radium's, and the ore contained far more of it. The Curies split the pair by crystallising the mixture again and again, since the radium salt dissolves slightly less.
Q 13Which tar-coloured ore did Marie and Pierre Curie process by the tonne to extract a speck of radium?
Pitchblende
Q 21Which radium tonic, sold in tiny bottles as a cure-all in the 1920s, killed a wealthy American industrialist?
Radithor
Radithor was simply radium dissolved in distilled water, and Eben Byers drank some 1,400 bottles of it. His death in 1932 ended the craze for radioactive medicines.
Q 22Eben Byers, who died after drinking some 1,400 bottles of radium tonic, was a US amateur champion in which sport?
Golf
Golf made Byers famous when he won the 1906 US Amateur. He began taking the tonic on a doctor's advice after a fall from a train berth, and kept on because it made him feel toned up.
Q 23Radium companies tried to dodge blame by claiming their dying dial painters really had which disease?
Syphilis
Pitchblende holds so little radium that a ton typically yields about a seventh of a gram. The Curies worked with leftover ore from which another metal had already been taken.
Q 14Roughly how long does it take for half of a sample of radium's most stable isotope to decay?
1,600 years
1,600 years is the half-life of radium-226, which makes up nearly all natural radium. A half-life that short, by geological standards, is what makes the metal so fiercely radioactive.
Q 15Nearly all radium in nature is constantly renewed by the slow decay of which heavier element?
Uranium
Uranium decays through a long chain of elements, and radium is one of the links. Any radium present when Earth formed vanished long ago, so every atom found today is freshly made.
Q 16Pure radium is a silvery-white metal, but which colour does its surface quickly turn in air?
Black
Black is the colour of the coating that forms almost at once, thought to be radium nitride. That would mean the metal reacts with the nitrogen in air rather than the oxygen.
Q 17Which technique did Marie Curie and André-Louis Debierne use in 1910 to isolate pure radium metal for the first time?
Electrolysis
Electrolysis of a radium chloride solution left the metal dissolved in a mercury electrode. Driving the mercury off in hydrogen gas then gave the first pure radium, twelve years after its discovery.
Q 18The alpha particles shot out by radium pick up electrons and become which gas, which can shatter radium crystals?
Helium
Helium builds up inside crystals of radium bromide as the particles settle into ordinary atoms. The trapped gas weakens the crystals until some crack or even explode.
Q 19What did Pierre Curie and Albert Laborde find that radium gives off continuously, an early clue to nuclear energy?
Heat
Heat pours out of radium without pause, enough to keep a sample warmer than the room around it. It was the first sign of the energy locked inside atoms.
Q 20Radium's name was built on radius, a word meaning ray or beam in which language?
Latin
Latin supplied the root because the new element gave off its energy in the form of rays. The same word gives geometry its term for the line from a circle's centre to its edge.
Syphilis was the diagnosis the firms pushed, since its stigma also smeared the women's reputations. Company chemists, meanwhile, handled radium with tongs, masks and screens.
Q 24The first Radium Girls to sue worked at a United States Radium Corporation plant in Orange, in which state?
New Jersey
New Jersey was home to the plant, where as many as 300 workers, mostly women, painted glowing dials. Five of them settled in 1928 for $10,000 each plus a yearly payment for life.
Q 25Which brand name did the United States Radium Corporation give its glow-in-the-dark radium paint?
Undark
Undark went on watches, compasses, locks and even fishing bait, and was sold as a kit for painting things at home. Rival firms sold near-identical paints under their own names.
Q 26Why do most radium watch dials made a century ago no longer glow in the dark?
The phosphor has worn out
The phosphor has worn out under decades of bombardment, while the radium beneath is almost as radioactive as the day it was painted. That is why a dark old dial should never be scraped or opened up.
Q 27Which less dangerous radioactive substance took over from radium on glowing watch dials by the 1970s?
Tritium
Tritium gives off radiation too weak to pass through skin, which made for a far safer glow. Most watches now use paint that is not radioactive at all and simply recharges in the light.
Q 28Which conflict first created mass demand for radium paint, to light soldiers' watches and instrument dials?
World War I
World War I put glowing dials in the trenches, where striking a light to check the time could give away a position. The paint was marketed to ordinary shoppers once the fighting ended.
Q 29Tho-Radia, launched in 1930s France under the name of a Dr Alfred Curie, was best known as a radium-laced what?
Beauty cream
Beauty cream was the flagship product, and the doctor on the label was no relation to the famous Curies. The radium left the brand in 1937, when new rules limited radioactive ingredients to prescriptions.
Q 30From the 1940s to the 1960s, US doctors pushed radium up children's noses to treat which problem?
Hearing loss
Hearing loss and repeated ear infections were the targets of the treatment. Airmen and submarine crews were given it too, for ear damage caused by changes in pressure.